Ethnocentricity

Freshman year, I was really focused on trying to fit in, having came from a small school and knowing nobody. I was so focused on societal standards and conformity, that when I was sitting at lunch one day, and a new kid sat down, I judged him immediately. He had a bit of an Israeli accent, and he was loud and different. Something about him was just unusual, and I couldn't place it. He was very forward about his thoughts and opinions and his sense of humor was so unfitting at our table, and I began to dislike him without even getting to know him. I grew frustrated when he would try to make a joke, because it just didn't make sense and was nothing like anything I was used to. I categorized him as "cocky" and began giving him attitude. I didn't know at the time how extreme my cultural relativism was, but I realize now that I wanted him to understand that his jokes and actions weren't funny to us. But what I did to show that was to give him attitude, whereas he directly told me his thoughts and feelings. Somehow it developed into a fight, and by the end of the fight, he apologized to me. I couldn't believe he did that, because it was my fault that any of this had even started. Just because I was being ethnocentric, and judging him because he was different, I started to pick fights with him, yet he apologized to me! And it hit me that he was an incredibly nice person, and one of the most real and genuine people I had ever met. We became friends and by sophomore year, he was my best friend. I learned so much from meeting him; the scariest was that sometimes judgement comes subconsciously and that I need to be really careful to be sociologically mindful of others. 

blog for Fri 9/16

This week, our class learned about the different advantages and disadvantages of using a survey vs. an ethnography in order to answer a sociological question. I think that based on Sudhir Venkatesh's results when he tried to answer his question about being black and poor, an ethnography will give more feedback. But my group was interested in people as a whole, and if we were to do an ethnography based off of observations at Stevenson High School, our results would probably differ a lot from observations at other high schools in poorer areas or of a different culture, because they would have different sociological imaginations. For some cultures, women have a much lower standing in their society because that's just how it has always been and has never changed, so they might have responded a lot differently to the questions, maybe seeing "sex without monogamy" as an okay thing, while our culture's social construction of reality is that both people need to be loyal in a relationship. However, because our results were mostly taken from Stevenson High School, they only told us about the students at Stevenson rather than society as a whole. Still, I found the results from our survey very interesting. We found that whether or not a person is male or female hardly influences the response to whether a person would wait until they have sex or whether they have or would involve him/herself in "sex without monogamy." It was also interesting to see that even though a person might decide to wait to have sex, never has said "I love you" to gain sexual relief, and never entered a relationship for sexual support, they a lot of times still considered having "sex without monogamy." It made me think that people don't really take relationships seriously if so many people are willing to have sex with another person while with being involved with someone else. I think that in this scenario, we probably would have been better off to simply talk to a variety of people because the questions may have confused some people, and since they were posted on facebook, there may have only been a certain group of people interested in taking the survey. It also would be better to have talked to people for the sake of having social mindfulness because they might feel really justified in their responses in a way I can't understand because Stevenson is so culturally diverse, and I don't know all of the beliefs of every culture in the school.

sociology applied to my life

When I reflected this week about sociological mindfulness, I started thinking about the books I had to read over the summer for English. They were both very cultural, but at the time, I didn't really acknowledge the open window those books provided. When I was reading, however, about how being sociologically mindful, I realized that it meant being truly open-minded to other people's cultures and beliefs, rather than judging them or comparing them with my own. After when I decided to think back to The Life of Pi, I realized how open Pi was and how his religious practices were really fascinating. He wasn't blindly believing in Hinduism just because he was Indian. He had learned about other faiths with an open mind and practiced not only Hinduism, but Christianity, and Islam. His culture alone was extremely interesting, but because I was able to read about his life, I was able to get an understanding of why he chose to practice all of those faiths. I think that being sociologically mindful is to be able to really place yourself in another person's shoes and to try and understand them without judgment.